An interview with an author

I can't think of a good way to preface this other than saying here, read this interview over at Metsblog.com, where Metsblog.com writer Regis Courtemanche interviewed author, blogger, and Mets fan Greg Prince about his book Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History.

Read the interview and buy the book. But don't spoil the ending for me, I'm not quite there yet.

Judge This Book By Its Cover

I meant to post this last night. I'm just relaying information from another blog that came out last night.

Noted author and Mets fan has a new book coming out. The Last Days of Shea: Delight and Despair in the life of a Mets fan. That's not new news anymore. We've known about his book for a while. Yesterday on his blog, Dana showed the world the cover. It's beautiful.



Let's dissect it. He has a great picture of Shea, with a beautiful blue partly cloudy sky serving as backdrop for the text. It's Shea, beautiful old Shea, with its symmetry and geometry as seen from probably the last row in the Upper Deck straight behind home plate. And the kicker - there's no Citi Field in the background.

I've always said that no good photo of Shea has Citi Field in the background. He used what I consider to be a classic shot of Shea (of any ballpark really) - what I call the "postcard shot". Get as high up as necessary to get the widest shot, as even as possible with the line drawn from home plate, through the pitcher's mound, and straight away center field, and shoot, and in the age of digital cameras and large memory sticks, shoot a lot.

I actually have a 1000 piece puzzle, put together and framed, in my living room, of Shea Stadium from a photo taken at the 2005 Home Opener from a similar vantage point. Just about any photo taken from there before the construction will be beautiful. You can buy the puzzle at amazon.com for a lot less than I paid for it in Port St. Lucie last year.

some light reading

I came across different posts talking about 2 different Mets-themed books.

One comes from Dana Brand with his new book The Last Days of Shea. A brief description of the book can be found on his blog. He's also written a book called Mets Fan. On his website, metsfanbook.com, he mentions that he is "a Professor of English and American Literature at Hofstra University", which is my alma mater (I studied Math and Education and, no offense, tried to stay as far away from the English department as I could).

The other comes from Greg, of the blog "Faith and Fear in Flushing". His book is called "Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History of the New York Mets", and he posts 99.9 sentences about his book.